Monthly Archives: January 2012

SOPA / PIPA and DeValcourt.com

3 Replies

This website is a personal blog. There isn’t much here that is useful to many. I have posted a couple of things here that have gotten quite the response via comments and some attention at some rather large companies. Some of the attention has been good and some bad. Mostly good though so I’m proud of that.

SOPA / PIPA has the potential to kill this blog, it could be from a blog post I’ve done or a comment left by someone.

Obviously I’m completely against SOPA/PIPA.

Here we have piece of legislation that can erode freedom of speech, among other issues, comes straight from the big corporations and lobbyists such as the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) who bought OUR politicians off to support this with no regard for true public comment or sentiment.

This bill is to solely protect the interests of greedy corporations and has gotten where it is due to greedy politicians. Absolutely no democracy at work here.

But it would appear that the people have and are speaking out. Finally taking a stand and united front on a cause. This I would say is democracy in action and now only time will tell if the voice of the people can win out over the pocketbooks of the corporations.

I beg you to please don’t stop calling your Senators and Congressmen and voice your opposition to this bill. The calls take just a couple of minutes but means so much.

You can find your Senator or Congressman here:

http://www.stopthewall.us/

If you live in Louisiana and have not already done so, please call the offices of Senators Landrieu (202-224-5824) and Vitter (202-224-4623) and (for the Lafayette area) Representative Boustany (202-225-2031) and tell them to vote NO on these bills!

You can also sign Google’s online petition here: http://www.google.com/landing/takeaction

2012 Ham Radio Contests

Making a list of the ham radio contests I’m hoping / planning to participate in this year:

Jan 7-8 RTTY Roundup
March 3-4 International DX Contest – Phone
April 15 Rookie Roundup – SSB
June 23-24 Field Day
August 19 Rookie Roundup – RTTY
November 17-19 November Sweepstakes, Phone

Please share with me any others you think I might be interested in.

ARRL RTTY RoundUp 2012

Ok well I think I’m ready for my very first real contest. ARRL RTTY Roundup! I’m going to really give a true go at it. I don’t expect much, but I’m hoping to really make some serious contacts. Don’t think a small dipole, single op is gong to compete with te big boys but I plan to have fun none the less.

I have worked on getting my MMTTY and N1MM configured and seems to be working. I have messed around with and tweaked some macros based on suggestions from http://rttycontesting.com and I’ve been reading both the RTTYContesting.com pages as well as AA5AU’s site at http://www.aa5au.com/hamradio/hamradio.html

Apparently AA5AU is a pretty big RTTY contester and seems to live pretty case by here in LA. Also paid a recent visit to my friend Charles KI5XP who lives just a few blocks away and discovered he was once pretty involved in RTTY competitions and has a lot of plaques from contests he won. He gave me some tips also that I’m going to give a shot and see how that helps.

My goal is simply to see what I can accomplish and how my setup works out. Hopefully I can actually have a real chance to win an award at the ARRL RTTY Rookie Roundup on August 19, 2012

Time to have some fun!

Ham Radio 2011 and WAS

What a year 2011 was for me in ham radio. Started out 2011 with the goal of just getting my Technician license. Honestly didn’t even originally have plans to purchase a radio, just wanted to get the license to say that I did.

Well.. needless to say I think I got a little carried away or bit by the proverbial bug.

On Jan. 6th 2011, I passed and got my Technician license

On Jan. 14th, 2011 I was granted my first call sign KF5JKZ

On Feb. 1st, 2011 I was granted my new vanity call sign W5DLD

On Feb. 10th, 2011 I passed and got my General license

On April 21st, 2011 my lovely wife gave me my first HF radio. She got me the Icom IC-7000 radio I wanted for our 10 yr anniversary.

Funny thing is that it took me almost 3 months just listening to my radio before I finally got the nerve to make my first HF contact.

On August 10, 2011 at 00:52 UTC I worked my very first HF contact NA0L in Boulder, Colorado on 40m SSB.

On August 28, 2011 I made my first DX contacts; Hawaii, Germany, Spain and Austria.

On Sept. 1st, 2011 I passed and got my Extra license

On Sept. 2, 2011 I made my first JT65 and PSK-31 contacts.

On Dec. 30, 2011 I decided to do my best to get the following missing states confirmed in LoTW before the end of the year: DE, GA, IA, LA, MS, MO, NE, ND, OR, VT and WA.

And about 24 hours later on Dec. 31st, 2011 with the help of many friends I’ve made through ham radio I was able to complete my first Basic WAS via LoTW!

Look how close that timestamp is for having submitted / completed my first WAS in 2011: 12-31-2011 23:37:59

I did technically have my Basic WAS via a mix of LoTW and QSL cards however I REALLY wanted to get all 50 states confirmed via LoTW instead of having to submit QSL cards.

Ham Radio has been an amazing hobby for me. I am very happy that I finally decided to get off my butt and get that first license. Since then it has been a wonderful experience that is constantly challenging me to learn new things as well as meet many new knowledgable people.

Looking forward to some new ham radio challenges in 2012!